What I Learned From the Witch of Positano

“This is how you dance, my darling” she said, taking my chubby six-year-old hand and drawing me onto the dance floor at the Buca di Bacco bar in Positano in Southern Italy. “Imagine you are dancing with the animals. Listen to the music, then feel your arm rise to stroke the neck of a giraffe or sweep across the back of a donkey. Now bend and feed the chickens. Allow yourself to dance with all the wild creatures.”

It was 1962, and I was a little girl in love with Vali, a wild red-haired Australian who lived with her husband Rudy in a converted shepherd’s hut up in the valley of Il Porto above Positano, along with dogs, cats, hens, a sow called Ramona, and a goat named Barbara, after my mother. (A story for another time.)

Vali Myers was born in Sydney Australia in 1930, leaving for Paris at age 19 to study dance. She lived at times on the streets, becoming part of the Bohemian scene, mixing with Django Reinhardt, Jean Cocteau, Jean Paul Sartre. Later, her small and shamanistic ink drawings of women and feminine magic, created using a goose feather while lying in bed, would be praised by Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, and sought after by the likes of Mick Jagger.

Patti Smith, a long-time fan, had Vali tattoo a lightning bolt on her knee and Tennessee Williams based the free-spirited character Carol, in the play “Orpheus Descending,” directly on her.

None of this I knew back then. Some of it had yet to happen. I remember instead, her bare white feet fluttering like doves across the dance floor. I remember her as an animist. An artist. A poet. Above all, as a wild spirit who wrote the story of her own life, in her own terms. And for this, she earned the moniker of The Witch of Positano.

As I began to create my Wild Soul Woman program, I felt Vali’s spirit with me. I recalled how I would follow her as she strode up the mountainside in her bright gypsy skirts. How I rode the pig Ramona up steep trails with Vali at my side. How she read my tea leaves, wanted to tattoo a snake on my upper lip (my mother wouldn’t allow it), taught me the power of being a free spirit. How I danced with her on the dusty earth outside her home, no music but the cicada and the barking of dogs. How she smelled of essential oils and animals.

Childless, Rudy and Vali took my brother David and me in for a while as if we were their own. Some nights, we slept in a cave close by their house.

Theirs was a world far away from my orderly London life. And I am forever grateful that my parents allowed my brother and me to have this experience, unmediated, and wholly wild, over many summers of our childhood.

The other day, I came across a video about Vali. My heart ached to see her, so beautiful, with her sharp moon-white face, funny, high-pitched voice and savage red hair. But it was the last lines of the video that shook me to the core. The filmmakers ended by saying, “She invented her own world in which she was able to dramatize and perform her curious inquiries into energy, poetry, and the soul.

Energy. Poetry. Soul. Why had I not seen it? When I studied poetry therapy, when I started to become fascinated by the archetypal energies of the Earth, when I began to explore the wild soul, Vali has always been there with me, guiding my path. I felt the truth of this settle deep inside, a full-body blessing.

Life is magic. Curious. Strange. Time weaves and spirals, and we return again to something seeded deep within us, and long ago.

Now, as I look at these precious photos of Vali and Rudi and their ecological Eden where I first felt the soft brush of lamb’s fur against my bare chest, where I drove a donkey cart and, with Vali, danced with the animals, I am filled with wonder and awe. The gift of it. The joy of it.

This is how you dance with the wild, my darlings. Shall we begin?

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